There’s never been a more important time to understand the political machinations that led to Harvey’s destructiveness – and dismantle them

‘The swamps and wetlands that once characterized Houston’s hinterland have been replaced with strip malls and suburban tract homes.’

Thursday 31 August 2017 10.13 EDT

Houston’s catastrophic flood will be framed by leaders in Texas as an unforeseeable act of God. It isn’t. Houston’s unfettered sprawl into the marshland of southeast Texas was a conscious choice by policymakers. So was building a global city on a slowly submerging swamp. Both were decisions that led to disaster.

Houston has quietly become our fourth largest and fastest-growing city, due in large part to cheap housing. But the latter has come at an exorbitant cost to its safety. The swamps and wetlands that once characterized Houston’s hinterland have been replaced with strip malls and suburban tract homes.

Those landscapes once served as a natural flood protection system for the city. Research shows that, if they hadn’t been filled and developed, Harvey’s impact would have been lessened.

Okay, but where did all this population growth in Houston come from? As usual, a text search for “migra” yields no hits. But until last week I was constantly reading about how immigration was powering Houston’s population growth.

It’s interesting to skim the bulk of the protesting replies to her, which were shocked that anyone could possibly imagine that immigration had anything to do with overpopulation in Houston. Note that the replies weren’t shocked, shocked like Captain Renault discovering gambling is going on in Casablanca, they were simply shocked at anyone being so vile as to mentally notice the connection between Bad Things (overpopulation, sprawl, paving the prairie, flooding) and The Good Thing: immigration.

That’s how people have been trained to think in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.